Does anyone know if Eric has done a bunk or something? Perhaps we could get this thread going again if he is returning. 

Dear Teacher and Mentor,

I have written three new sonnets since we started Sonnet Central. Will we have an opportunity to have our own efforts examined, put under the microscope, critiqued and "slammed." ~smile~

Maybe we could sticky the threads we want to remain on top of this forum for teaching and discussion and let the rest of the threads be for us to post our sonnets for revision and help. We might set a limit to one sonnet per week or 14 days per student?

Let me know.

Norm

So who is that guy in the hat, anyway?

For those who haven't met me, I'm Eric Lee.  

If you've heard of me at all in the world of poetry, you're probably a fan of the genre "Cowboy Poetry", since I have never been famous in any other arena.  

However, I wrote my first sonnet at eight years old, and Rene (duetsdove) has accused me, on occasion, of thinking in iambic.

She may well be right...I was taught to read by my grandfather and he only owned four books: the King James Bible, a Masonic Manual he  never let me touch, and the Collected Works of Shakespeare in two volumes.  At twelve, I fell deeply in love with Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and at fourteen I was spoken to as if by the voice of God by the works of John Milton.  (Don't anyone go running for the door just yet...I'm not a preacher anymore!)

I've probably written over 400 sonnets in the 41 years since my first one, including a sequence of 121 in my college days that my Professor of English described as "very worthy" (whatever that means) and can take credit for adding to the variations on the form with my own creation, the Mythic Sonnet.  We'll discuss that one when we start to discuss the various rhyme-schemes that distinguish one variation from the other in the realm of "fourteen lines of iambic pentameter."

I want to tell you this, though...up front.

Although nearly every one of those nearly 400 sonnets were written with mostly perfect rhyme and most with near-flawless meter...well over half of them were utter crap!  The key to GOOD rhyme and meter poetry is that the form should be INVISIBLE!  

By this I mean that if you strip the poem of stanzaic line breaks, and put it down word-for-word in the simple structure of paragraphs of prose, it should read and sound like normal speech...and should read and sound exactly as it did with all stanzas and line breaks in place.

A rhyme&meter poem should read as if the rhyme and meter had occurred by sheer coincidence.

If you strip the line-breaks from a poem and read it aloud as prose, and anything sounds different, then somewhere in the construction of that poem, you've forced the rhyme or forced the meter.  If it doesn't sound like something you would have said that way to begin with, then it doesn't sound like normal speech, and again, you've forced something.

That's why over 200 sonnets with near-perfect rhyme and meter have now turned out to be crap...I forced something.

Poetry is a liquid medium, y'all.  If it's going to transport you, it must flow.

Hey Norm!

I'm excited to see this.  I have trouble with sonnets for some reason (I've only written one) and I'm hoping to learn something that will help.

Are you going to start a new thread for posting our own sonnets or do we just start a new topic?

Cathy

As the title implies, this forum is all about the Sonnet. There will be instruction threads, discussions, and the ability for members to post their own sonnets for critique. Our own resident sonnet guru, Eric, will be the principal moderator for this forum.  Everyone is invited to join in however s/he wishes. ALL threads will be open for posting. You may also post your own sonnets here whenever you wish -- please limit it to only two poems a week LOL.

Our goal is to provide this very special  place to concentrate on a poetic form that has survived centuries with some of the most notable master poet's names attached to the very mention of the word "Sonnet:"

Sapphos (ancient Greek)
Petrarch (14th century)
Shakespeare (16th century)
and  Spenser, Milton and a host of others.

I am sure we will have a "History of the Sonnet" threads posted here soon.

I thought it would appropriate to post a sonnet right in this introductory thread. It is a Petrarchan Sonnet  (also named the Italian Sonnet) which I am sure we will discuss along the way.

The Garden  
  by Edward Arlington Robinson
 
There is a fenceless garden overgrown 
With buds and blossoms and all sorts of leaves; 
And once, among the roses and the sheaves, 
The Gardener and I were there alone. 

He led me to the plot where I had thrown 
The fennel of my days on wasted ground, 
And in that riot of sad weeds I found 
The fruitage of a life that was my own. 

My life! Ah, yes, there was my life, indeed! 
And there were all the lives of humankind; 
And they were like a book that I could read, 
Whose every leaf, miraculously signed, 
Outrolled itself from Thought's eternal seed, 
Love-rooted in God's garden of the mind.